Non-residential and residential electricity accounts are benefitting from government relief measures, the Environmental Bureau announced today.

Under the measures, nearly 90% of non-residential electricity bills obtained a 75% subsidy for electricity charges in March, while 40% of residential electricity accounts enjoyed zero electricity charges in the first quarter of the year.

The Government announced about $2.3 billion in provisions last December to provide an electricity charge subsidy to each eligible non-residential electricity account holder to cover 75% of their monthly electricity charges for four months, subject to a monthly cap of $5,000.

The Budget further provided $2.9 billion to extend the subsidy period to eight months.

According to the bills issued by the two power companies in March, 360,000 non-residential bills obtained a 75% subsidy. This is close to 90% of the total eligible non-residential tariff bills.

To balance the impact on people's livelihood of the recent transition to cleaner electricity generating systems in Hong Kong, the bureau implemented the electricity charges relief scheme in January 2019.

A monthly electricity charge relief of $50 has been granted to each eligible residential electricity account for 60 months.

To help the public cope with the challenging economic environment, the Government implemented a new round of one-off electricity charge subsidy schemes in January.

A subsidy of $160 will be credited to each residential electricity account from January to November, while $240 will be credited in December.

From early this year, over 2.7 million households have been benefitting from both the electricity charges relief measures and the electricity charges subsidy. The bills of the two power companies indicated that 40% of residential electricity accounts, representing 1 million households, enjoyed zero electricity charges.

The bureau called on the community to cherish environmental resources, including saving energy and electricity to mitigate climate change and improve air quality.

Seventy-year-old Theresa Chan suffers from joint degeneration, which is why she needs a walking stick.

“My joints are severely abraded. They are painful when I walk or stand. My doctor suggested I replace some joints with implants, but I don't want surgery,” she said.

Smart seniors

Interested in how gerontechnology can help improve the quality of life for older adults, Ms Chan joined the Gerontechnology Practitioner Training Course under Lingnan University’s Gerontechnology & Smart Ageing Project.

The course targets elderly people and caregivers. It introduces them to devices that help seniors get around with ease and live more independent lives.

Ms Chan was impressed by a smart walking stick that is equipped with senior-worthy features like a flashlight with an adjustable safety light, a siren for emergency use and a radio.

“I am grateful for the course because I can learn more about gerontechnology in my free time. After class, I can share my knowledge with others who have no idea about this new technology. It is modern and I want to keep up with the times and progress,” she said.

Youth opportunities

Gerontechnology has also opened up career opportunities for young people.

Cecilia Auyeung recently graduated from Lingnan University with a major in marketing. Last year she set up a social enterprise called Gatherly. It provides a platform for the elderly to teach other people handicraft skills and helps them to sell their products online.

Ms Auyeung joined the Socialpreneur Incubation Course under the Lingnan University project. It encourages the development of social enterprises in Hong Kong, gerontechnology and marketing. She quickly drew inspiration from other socialpreneurs.

“I discovered that my social enterprise has to change every two years according to market demands. For example, fabric bags are popular among youngsters. While the elderly at Gatherly are equipped with blue-dye techniques, I make use of their skills to create products that match the market situation.”

University contribution

According to the Census & Statistics Department, in 2036, the proportion of the population aged 65 and over is projected to be 31%. To meet the needs of an ageing population, the Government is promoting gerontechnology, which combines gerontology and technology. It focuses on providing effective solutions to increase vitality and quality of life.

The Lingnan University’s three-year project aims to enhance public understanding of gerontechnology and support smart ageing socialpreneurship development. The project also covers studies with the goal of building a database for gerontech products and services as well as social innovation and startups. The overall vision is to offer policy recommendations to the industry and Government.

Lingnan University Asia-Pacific Institute of Ageing Studies Project Manager Chloe Siu said: “Most of the participating students are willing to think out-of-the-box, using their creativity and knowledge learnt from their courses and to echo the needs of the society. We are trying to facilitate different stakeholders and community partners to create a co-working atmosphere.”

The university has also built a 2,000 sq ft Gerontech-X Lab to display over 40 gerontech products catered to healthcare, dining, living and transport. Anyone interested can book an appointment for a free visit from November 28.

Entrepreneur Ricky Chan’s information technology company has been hard at work developing a virtual reality application that enables designers and their clients to walk through different versions of their home or office without having to physically move a single piece of furniture.

From the colour of the walls to the style of fixtures and fittings, Mr Chan’s app caters to all personal tastes and design ideas.

“We have customers who are interior designers or furniture retailers. Our virtual reality application brings their sketches to life. Designers in the past needed weeks to produce sketches. Now they can make designs instantly,” he explained.

Up to 40% of the application was developed at Smart-Space 8 in Tsuen Wan, Cyberport’s first co-working space outside its main Pok Fu Lam campus.

“Cyberport provides funding that helps to lower our expenses and we can hold seminars here with a rental fee that is much lower than the market price,” Mr Chan added.
 

The 20,000 sq ft space launched last year was specifically designed with young entrepreneurs in mind and provides workshops and seminars for startups. For companies that wish to join the Smart-Space 8 community, one of its founders must be aged between 18 and 35 and the company itself should not have been in operation for longer than seven years.

Smart-Space 8 users are entitled to comprehensive entrepreneurial support and value-added services to accelerate their businesses such as the Cyberport Creative Micro Fund and Cyberport Incubation Programme.

Mr Chan, who lives in the New Territories, said the added bonus of setting up shop in Smart-Space 8 is the commute, as Cyberport in Pok Fu Lam is farther away for him and his clients.

Cyberport may be expanding beyond Pok Fu Lam, but some entrepreneurs like agriculture technology company CEO and founder Gordon Tam have opted to stay at the home campus because of the incentives available.

“The business network here is unique. There are so many startups and we encourage and learn from each other.”

Mr Tam’s company sells vegetables from an indoor farm to local supermarkets and is now exploring the overseas market. He credits the vibrant community and ecosystem at Cyberport for building up his business.

“Traditional agriculture comes with a host of problems and the efficiency of Hong Kong’s agriculture industry is relatively low. This is why we are looking into indoor agriculture. We want to grow plants in industrial buildings.”

When Mr Tam joined the Cyberport Incubation Programme, his firm was offered two years of rent reduction. But more importantly, he said, the space is a one-of-a-kind ecosystem where his team can brainstorm ideas and continue to innovate.

Other startup owners share the same sentiment. Information technology company CEO and founder Stark Chan noted that with Cyberport as a public body, it offers a lot of support and rents are more stable.

“We have been here since we first started up. My colleagues are familiar with this environment and the atmosphere is good for innovation,” Mr Chan said.

The SAS Universal Viewer displays null values appropriately as blanks for XPT files. However, when you select Table ? Save As and save an XPT file as either an XML or CSV file, the SAS Universal Viewer con

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(Cleveland Clinic) A new Cleveland Clinic study demonstrates the importance of genetics evaluation and genetic testing for children, adolescents and young adults with solid tumor cancers. The study was published today in Nature Communications.

(American Association for Cancer Research) Combining intratumoral electroporation of interleukin-12 (IL-12) DNA (tavokinogene telseplasmid, or TAVO) with the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) led to clinical responses in patients with immunologically quiescent advanced melanoma, according to results from a phase II trial.

(Dartmouth College) Expanded Dartmouth awards program gives prizes for 'spec fic' playwriting on what it means to be human in a computerized world.

(Moscow Research and Practical Clinical Center for Diagnostics and Telemedicine Technologies) Researchers of the Moscow Diagnostics and Telemedicine Center collected a dataset that includes more than a thousand sets of chest CT scans of patients with imaging finding of COVID-19. As of today, it is the largest completely anonymized database of CT studies, which has no analogues in Russia or in the world. It is available for download and can be used for developing services based on artificial intelligence technologies.

(New Jersey Institute of Technology) A team of NJIT physicists has developed a novel test swab that can be 3D printed using inexpensive, widely available materials and speedily assembled in a range of fabrication settings. To augment the nation's testing capabilities, the inventors are making the swab's design publicly available, free of licensing fees, during the COVID-19 emergency.

(Taylor & Francis Group) Over 80% of people surveyed in a study do not plan to conceive during the COVID-19 crisis, perhaps putting to rest suggestions that the lockdown could lead to rise in birth numbers.

(American Marketing Association) Nonprofits may better meet their missions by learning to effectively employ the entirety of the marketing mix to attract individuals to available donation opportunities.

(Queensland University of Technology) It started life as the concept drawing for a mobile 'status update' tool only geeks could love. Now we cannot imagine a world without Twitter, its hashtags, and the worldwide movements it has helped create. A new book tracks its journey.

(St. Jude Children's Research Hospital) Funding will help expand collaboration across engineering and physical sciences to expand tools for studying pediatric diseases.

(Uppsala University) Artificial intelligence (AI) may be an aid to interpreting ECG results, helping healthcare staff to diagnose diseases that affect the heart. Researchers at Uppsala University and heart specialists in Brazil have developed an AI that automatically diagnoses atrial fibrillation and five other common ECG abnormalities just as well as a cardiologist. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

(Simon Fraser University) SFU professor Caroline Colijn’s research and data modelling to map the spread of COVID-19 in British Columbia has helped her procure funding from Genome B.C., a non-profit research organization that leads genomics innovation on Canada’s West Coast.

(Cornell University) To help future scientists make sense of what their telescopes are showing them, Cornell University astronomers have developed a spectral field guide for rocky worlds orbiting white dwarf stars.

(International Astronomical Union) The Gruber Cosmology Prize, which is co-sponsored by the IAU, recognises scientists whose discoveries have driven fundamental advances in our understanding of the Universe. The 2020 prize has been awarded to Lars Hernquist and Volker Springel for their pioneering work on cosmological simulations, which have not only led to their own discoveries, but also become an invaluable resource used widely by other researchers.

(Aarhus University) An international team of researchers has put together a new image of Neanderthals based on the genes Neanderthals left in the DNA of modern humans when they had children with them about 50,000 years ago. The researchers found the new information by trawling the genomes of more than 27,000 Icelanders. Among other things, they discovered that Neanderthal children had older mothers and younger fathers than the Homo-Sapien children in Africa did at the time.

There is no special announcement (19:45 HKT on 03.05.2020)

(Texas A&M University) Spoiling foods, souring wine and worsening wounds have a common culprit -- a process called oxidation. Although the ill effects of these chemical reactions can be curtailed by antioxidants, creating a sturdy platform capable of providing prolonged antioxidant activity is an ongoing challenge.

(Bentham Science Publishers) This comprehensive review presented by researchers from K.S. Rangasamy College of Arts and Science, Tiruchengode, Tamil-Nadu, India, gives readers a brief overview of phytoconstituents, nutritional values and medicinal properties of the plant.

(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) Researchers will soon have access to the full genomic sequences for 23 marine mammal species preserved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), thanks to an ongoing collaboration between NIST and a scientific consortium called the DNA Zoo.

(Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research) Thanks to the support of additional German research vessels, the MOSAiC expedition will continue, despite the coronavirus pandemic. The new team will start in May.

(University of Colorado at Boulder) CU Boulder researchers have developed a method that could enable scientists to accurately forecast ocean acidity up to five years in advance. This would enable fisheries and communities that depend on seafood negatively affected by ocean acidification to adapt to changing conditions in real time, improving economic and food security in the next few decades.

(Marine Biological Laboratory) Microbial life is bubbling up to the ocean floor along with fluids from deeply buried petroleum reservoirs, reports a team of scientists from the University of Calgary and the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole.

(Earth Institute at Columbia University) A uniquely resilient organism all but unheard of in the Arabian Sea 20 years ago has been proliferating and spreading at an alarming pace. New research describes how the continued loss of snow over the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau region is fueling the expansion of this destructive algal bloom.

(University of Hawaii at Manoa) In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, found in the next few decades, sea level rise will likely cause large and increasing percentages of land area to be impacted simultaneously by the three flood mechanisms. Further, they found direct marine inundation represents the least extensive--only three percent of the predicted flooding, while groundwater inundation represents the most extensive flood source.

Chief Justice Patience Roggensack faced backlash for her comment, with some people calling it "elitist" to separate meatpackers from "regular folks."

You can now add Fresno to the growing list of cities that are now requiring people to wear face masks in public places.

The budget carrier will begin conducting temperature checks via touchless thermometers on June 1. Passengers have to start wearing masks Friday.

The streets of Chicago may be largely empty as residents hunker down from coronavirus but some of the city's most deprived neighborhoods are still echoing to the sound of deadly gunfire and raucous partying. While significant falls in crime have been one of the few positive side effects of lockdowns in much of the United States and elsewhere, they have barely made a dent in the homicide rate in Chicago, a city that has long recorded the most murders in the country. Chicago police say 56 murders were committed in April despite statewide stay-at-home orders -- only a fraction lower than the 61 for the same month in 2019 -- while last weekend, the first of the new month, four people were killed and 46 others shot and wounded.

It may not be a pardon. But the Justice Department has dropped charges against Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.Retired Army Lt. Gen. Flynn, an important figure in the war on terror who gave Trump’s 2016 run military validation, will avoid prison time after the Justice Department provided a deliverance on Thursday that Flynn had long sought. It is also the second redemption that Trump has provided the general, who served as his first national security adviser for less than a month. “The Government has determined, pursuant to the Principles of Federal Prosecution and based on an extensive review and careful consideration of the circumstances, that continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice,” wrote Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a former senior aide to Attorney General William Barr. Shortly before the filing, lead prosecutor Brandon Von Grack abruptly withdrew from the case.The Justice Department filing, in essence, portrays Flynn as the victim of an FBI frame-up job, and his lies to the FBI as legally marginal. Shea wrote that Flynn’s lies needed to have been “not simply false, but ‘materially’ false with respect to a matter under investigation.” Later in the filing, Shea referred to those lies as “gaps in [Flynn’s] memory,” rather than deliberate falsehoods Flynn conceded. “Even if he told the truth, Mr. Flynn’s statements could not have conceivably ‘influenced’ an investigation that had neither a legitimate counterintelligence nor criminal purpose,” Shea wrote.It was an astonishing turnaround since 2018, when a federal judge said to Flynn in a sentencing hearing, “arguably, you sold your country out.” That judge, Emmet Sullivan, could still decide to reject Shea’s filing and continue with Flynn’ sentencing. Michael Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department inspector general, tweeted that the extraordinary move represented “a pardon by another name” and called it a “black day in DOJ history.”Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the decision to drop charges was “outrageous” and revealed “a politicized and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) added, “If Barr’s Justice Department will drop charges against someone who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and who the White House publicly fired for lying to the vice president, there’s nothing it won’t do, no investigation it won’t taint.”Neither Flynn nor his attorney, Sidney Powell, responded immediately to requests for comment.Speaking to reports on Thursday afternoon, Trump said he had no prior knowledge of the Justice Department’s decision. “He was an innocent man,” Trump said, of Flynn. “Now in my book he’s an even greater warrior.”The dropped charges follow a years-long groundswell from Trump’s base, and particularly Fox News, to clear Flynn. His advocates claim that Flynn was set up by the same disreputable FBI figures who they believe persecuted Trump over phantom collusion with Russia.Flynn’s guilty plea, in December, 2017, has been no obstacle to the narrative, particularly since Flynn sought afterwards, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his plea. His sentencing, initially set for February, had also been delayed.Last month, agitation for a Flynn pardon intensified after documents emerged from two of Trump’s most hated ex-FBI figures, counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, discussing Flynn’s fateful January 2017 interview with the FBI. Page asked when and how to “slip it in” to Flynn that lying to an FBI agent is a crime, something that Flynn’s advocates believed showed the general being railroaded from the start. But veteran FBI agents and prosecutors have pointed out that the FBI is not legally obligated to inform an interview subject that lying to them is illegal. “Michael Flynn was very familiar with the FBI,” said Stephanie Douglas, a former executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch. “He would certainly have been aware of his obligation to provide candid and truthful information. His claim he was tricked and manipulated doesn’t sound valid to me.” Shea, in his Thursday court filing, suggested the FBI officials were “fishing for falsehoods merely to manufacture jurisdiction over any statement.” In Shea’s view, Flynn’s lies were less germane to the prosecution than the FBI “lack[ing] sufficient basis to sustain its initial counterintelligence investigation,” and its pre-interview position that it ought to close the investigation before speaking with the then national security adviser.Former FBI deputy head Andrew McCabe said on Thursday that the suggestion there was no reason to interview Flynn was “patently false, and ignores the considerable national security risk his contacts raised.” He said Flynn’s lies added to the FBI’s concerns about his relationship with Russia. “Today’s move... is pure politics designed to please the president,” he added.U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, who was appointed by Barr to review Flynn’s and other high-profile cases, said on Thursday that he concluded “the proper and just course” was to dismiss the case. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed,” he said.The FBI Didn’t Frame Michael Flynn. That’s Just Trump’s Excuse for a Prospective Pardon.While serving as national security adviser, Flynn misled FBI interviewers about conversations he had with the then-Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. In one of those late 2016 conversations, according to court filings, Flynn asked the Russians to avoid escalatory actions in response to sanctions and diplomatic expulsions then President Barack Obama enacted as reprisal for Russian electoral interference. Shea, in his filing, called Flynn’s Kislyak calls “entirely appropriate on their face.”The national security adviser’s lies prompted the holdover attorney general, Sally Yates, to warn the White House that Flynn had given the Russians leverage to blackmail him. But it would take weeks before Trump fired Flynn over “an eroding level of trust” concerning misleading Vice President Mike Pence on the Kislyak contacts. By May, Trump was said to have regretted dismissing the general.  Flynn in 2017 agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The general avoided charges for taking $530,000 in unregistered money from interests connected to the Turkish government—something he only declared with the Justice Department after his downfall as national security adviser. During a sentencing hearing in 2018, a federal judge castigated Flynn for disgracing the uniform Flynn wore for three decades. “Arguably, you sold your country out,” Judge Emmet Sullivan said. Two years earlier, on stage at the Republican national convention, Flynn had led a chant of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. Protesters outside Flynn’s courtroom did not let the general forget it. Trump’s enduring bond with Flynn is a testament to the importance of the role the general played in 2016.A host of national security officials, many aligned with the Republican Party, rejected Trump in 2016 as unfit to be president owing to his nativism, his penchant for brutality and his benign view of dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Flynn was the exception. And the general was an exceptional figure. As the intelligence chief for the Joint Special Operations Command during the mid-2000s, Flynn is one of a select few people who can be said to have personally prosecuted the most sensitive missions of the war on terror. Michael Flynn Putting Mueller Deal at Risk in ‘Dangerous’ New TrialIt was a pivotal credential in another way. Flynn emerged from the war on terror endorsing Trump’s view that the security apparatus, abetted by hidebound liberals and cowardly conservatives, had neutered the war on terror by refusing to see it was a civilizational conflict with Islam. “Islam is a political ideology” that “hides behind this notion of being a religion,” Flynn told the Islamophobic group ACT for America shortly after the 2016 convention. His hostility to Islam informed his sanguine view of Russia, which both Flynn and Trump saw as naturally aligned with the U.S. against what they called “Radical Islamic Terror.”It also meant that Trump and Flynn shared a common bureaucratic enemy. James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, was a lead architect of an intelligence assessment finding Russia intervened in the election on Trump’s behalf. In 2014, Clapper fired Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was deeply embittering. Just four years earlier, Flynn had been hailed as an innovator after claiming U.S. military intelligence had misunderstood the Afghanistan war. While Flynn portrayed himself as a martyr, victimized by the ‘Deep State’ for daring to warn about radical Islam, Clapper and other intelligence leaders had fallen out with Flynn over what they considered an incompetent management style and an iffy relationship with the truth. Reportedly, Flynn believed Iran was involved in the 2012 assault on a CIA compound in Benghazi that killed four Americans, and claimed incorrectly that Iran was responsible for more American deaths than al-Qaeda. Aides referred to such untruths as “Flynn facts.” Flynn facts did not disturb Trump. They validated his instincts on national security. Trump rewarded Flynn by making him national security adviser, one of the most important positions in the U.S. security apparatus. It was the first time Trump redeemed Flynn. Thursday’s dropped charges represent the second. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

The U.S. Navy is in “rough waters” and suffering from leadership failures, the diplomat tapped to be the next Navy secretary told a Senate committee Thursday. Kenneth J. Braithwaite, the ambassador to Norway and a retired Navy rear admiral, faced repeated questions about recent crises that have rocked the service, including the firing of an aircraft carrier captain who urged faster action to fight a coronavirus outbreak on his ship and the subsequent resignation of the acting secretary who fired him. Braithwaite said that Navy culture has been tarnished and trust in the service's leaders has broken down.

As businesses slowly reopen, experts warn that social distancing may need to be dialed back up: ‘It’s not an on-off switch’ * Coronavirus – latest US updates * Coronavirus – latest global updatesSome California businesses on Friday began opening their doors for business – at least partially.As states and counties across the nation contend with pressure to lift the stay-at-home measures that have destroyed local economies, California is taking an especially cautious approach, walking a fine line between political and economic pressure to reopen and the public health imperative to stop the spread of disease.Public health experts told the Guardian that while no US state was equipped with enough coronavirus testing and surveillance to feel fully confident reopening, California’s slow, piecemeal recovery plan – though far from perfect – seemed like the least risky option. The planSeven weeks after the governor, Gavin Newsom, ordered his 40 million constituents to shelter in place and all non-essential businesses to close, California on Friday entered phase two of its grand reopening plan.Some retail stores, including bookshops, florists, music stores, clothing and sporting goods retailers, can reopen if they organize curbside pickup. Some manufacturing and logistics in the retail supply chain can restart as well, as long as they follow safety and hygiene protocols. And local authorities are allowed to ease regulations further than the state guidelines if they meet certain testing and sanitation requirements.Phase three of the plan – potentially months away – could see salons, gyms, movie theaters and in-person church services resume. Phase four would end all restrictions. The timingFriday’s reopenings come as California has avoided the surge of infections states like New York have seen. And although California has seen more than 61,000 cases and 2,500 deaths, its hospitals have not been overwhelmed.Last week, state officials reported the first week-over-week decline in Covid-19 deaths.The new guidelines also follow small but sustained protests across the state to demand a relaxation of regulations to revive the state’s crippled economy, and some rural counties have partially reopened in defiance of the lockdown measures. The caveatsHowever, California still hasn’t seen the two weeks of declining cases that the White House suggested as a criterion for easing restrictions and that several European countries have used as a benchmark.The state also lacks the robust testing and tracking systems that countries such as Germany and South Korea have used.The state has ramped up its ability to administer and process tests, although for now, its rate of 29,414 tests a day is below the figure required by some analyses.Authorities are working to put a robust contact tracing effort in place to make sure those who test positive get the care they need and are able to isolate themselves until they recover. Although some counties and communities have spearheaded community-wide testing and tracing programs, overall, the state isn’t at the point where its system is as widespread or efficient as a country like Germany’s.Experts say California should also have a system in place to make sure vulnerable, unhoused populations have access to shelter and medical care – to prevent infection flare-ups in homeless shelters and encampments. Progress on those measures heavily varies county by county.And ideally, there would be a treatment or a vaccine before reopening, said Dr Richard Jackson, a professor emeritus at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the former head of the California department of public health. While we await a cure, Jackson cautioned, “no one should feel completely safe as we remove restrictions.” The trade-offsCalifornia’s reopening strategy stands in sharp contrast to the approach of states like Georgia, which suddenly allowed gyms, barber shops, hair salons, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys to welcome customers last week.“What certain places have done, where they’ve just thrown open the doors and said, ‘OK, we don’t have to keep our distance any more,’ is a colossal mistake,” Jackson said. Reopening businesses that put lots of people into close contact and speed the spread of disease will reverse the success of shelter-in-place rules, he noted, and overwhelm hospitals as cases surge. “Doing it very cautiously and carefully does make sense at this point in time,” he said.“I get that governors have to balance the public health goals with the economic goals,” said Dr Robert Tsai, surgeon and health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “But this stage of the pandemic is really all about trade-offs,” he noted. The weeks aheadIn the coming weeks, state and local leaders will have to watch closely and prepare to dial the distancing back up if the number of cases surges, said Tsai.“Social distancing isn’t an on-off switch. What it needs to be is a dial, which can be turned up or down depending on what the data show on the ground in terms of how the Covid-19 epidemic is progressing.“Reopening is going to be a very complicated process, and it should be complicated,” he added. “Because this is about making sure that people don’t end up in the hospital or dying.”That California’s plan allows for counties to maintain stricter distancing guidelines or ease up measures could be both a strength and a liability.The flexibility has allowed hotspots like the Bay Area and Los Angeles to take a more cautious approach, but it has also already caused confusion. In San Diego, where curbside shopping has already begun, business owners were unsure what, if anything, would change on Friday. In Bakersfield, restaurants allowed patrons to dine in on Monday and Tuesday, in defiance of the state’s guidelines.A hodgepodge reopening could cause surges in cases; Californians who travel between more lax and more strict counties could spread infections. Moreover, a rush to reopen fast in some areas could be counterproductive to economic recovery, said Alessandro Rebucci, an economist at the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business.“If you reopen when the pandemic is still out there, people and businesses will not just go back to normal,” Rebucci noted. Based on research from China, it seems clear that fear of contracting the illness will keep businesses owners and patrons home until they feel it’s safe enough, he said.

(Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University) Lynn Tran, a student in the University System of Georgia MD/PhD program at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, has received a Louise McBee Scholarship from the Georgia Association for Women in Higher Education.

(Osaka University) Researchers from Osaka University and Mandom Corporation succeeded in generating immortalized myoepithelial cells in human eccrine sweat glands, providing a novel test system for research on human sweating.

(American Geriatrics Society) The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) annually honors researchers, clinicians, educators, and emerging health professionals who have made outstanding contributions to high-quality, person-centered care for older people. This year's award recipients include more than 20 leaders representing the breadth of disciplines championing care for us all as we age.

(American Geriatrics Society) The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the AGS Health in Aging Foundation today conferred one of their newest honors, the Arti Hurria Memorial Award for Emerging Investigators in Internal Medicine Focused on the Care of Older Adults, on two experts: Rasheeda Hall, MD, a board-certified nephrologist and assistant professor of medicine at Duke University; and Kah Poh (Melissa) Loh, MBBCh, BAO, a board-certified internist, hematologist, and oncologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.